94

Movie studios are a mixed bag. I don't pretend to understand their inner workings. Last night I went to see Eragon. I should have known this would be a bad movie... I mean, the author only changed one letter in 'Dragon' to make the title character, and only managed to take that letter one step in the alphabet. This should have been a clue about the fundamental lack of creativity on his part. I was expecting a formuliac movie- but then, almost every movie is written to a formula, so of course I was expecting it, but the degree it followed the formula was shocking. I mean seriously, this kid who wrote the book took as his sole inspiration other books in the genre, and not the good ones. I liked these books when younger, so I can simpathize with him- but not with the adults in the propduction company that actually thought this would make a good movie. There are SO MANY well written fantasy books with plots that will surprise anyone who hasn't already read them- if you are going to derive a movie from a book, make sure it is a GOOD BOOK. Not all movies made from good books are good movies... but your chances get better if the book is.

Now on to the delivery- I went to the theatre, paid my money, waited in my seat, moved as asked by the usher, sat through the 10 minutes of commercials unrelated to movies and another 15-20 of actual movie trailers, all before the start of this crappy movie. I could have stayed home, downloaded a movie, watched it at my leasure, in the comfort of my home, for free. Of course the second option involes some illegal acts, but so what? I jay walk, I drive above the speed limit, I drank before I was of age, I consumed illegal drugs. The law only matters if it is enforcable. Copyright in the internet age is a pipe dream. The makers of entertainment content have to get that through their heads and realize that they have to compete with the people who will steal their work. The only edge they now have is the quality of experience- watching a movie on the big screen is still better than anythign I can do at home, which is why I will occasionally go out to see one. All this crap they put me through- the insane food prices, the endless commercials, erode that last advantage that the theatres have. I've already PAID you, DO NOT make me watch COMMERCIALS. Realize that your industry is changing and ADAPT.

95

Working sucks. Actually, not working itself- looking for work. I live in freaking Calgary Alberta Canada. The province of unlimited opportunity, right? Yeah, if you want to work in a fucking warehouse, in sales, or in service. Or if you have some sort of fucking qualifications. I left my longstanding job in the service industry, to move into something more interesting, maybe more lucrative. If i post my resume to any of those job search web sites, I get inundated with calls from those places I do not want to work at. Yet meanwhile, everyone is whining that there aren't enough people to do the work they want done. How do I reach these people? It fucking sucks. I'm not afraid of hard work, I just don't want to be trapped in a dead end position while the whole economy is moving so far ahead. I'm not even picky- I'll work pretty much anything as long as there is some sort of long-term advancement to it. This actually seems to be a liability- becasue I haven't chosen to focus on one type of job, people thing I'm aimless. Does it make me aimless that I don't actually care what kind of work I'm doing as long as it pays well and isn't a fucking dead end? I wouldn't be in this position if the economy wasn't supposedly 'booming', I'd have stuck with the crappy evenings and weekends thing I had before. But I tried to trade up and now I'm stuck between going back to somethign I know I won't like or looking around mindlessly for one of these positions that is supposedly available everywhere- yet which I cannot find. I'm the fucking idiot, here. Stupid me for listening to the goddamn media. Stupid me for thinking that just because I want to work in this boomtown I wouldn't have to settle for a crap jobs.

96

Well, I can't go after him directly till I finish my countdown, but surely it's only reasonable to assume that some of those 100 posts will have to touch on things he does or advocates. So While I won't mention him by name, I will be writing about one of his most recent stupid decisions.

Lets not fund stem-cell research, he says. Wonderful, say the scientific communities in every nation outside of the US: this means the best and the brightest will be drawn away from American institutions. But like it or not, the American government is a huge source of funding for research. A lot of that is already drying up because certain foriegn adventures are consuming more of the budget by the hour, but striking stem-cell altogether is bad all the same. This is good research, promsing science, that could, and still eventually will result in treatments for some major illnesses. Against that we have, what, life begins at conception? Really? Jesus monkey-fucking christ. It's a ball of cells the size of a pinhead. It does not feel, it does not think, it does not care if you kill it. You can create one from sperm and eggs, both of which are discarded constantly without so much as a peep from these moronic pro-life fucktards. If you were really pro-life, you'd adhere to a definition of life that makes an actual human being a member of somethign more special than the post-conception club. Kill a million embryos to find one cure and I think you're a saint. Save them for... what? Adoption? Idiots. There are plenty of living human babies available for that. If you care more about the life of an embryo than the life of a person you are not just stupid, you are stupid to the point of malace.

97

Survivor was entertaining. Not to me, but to people. Still is for some people. I don't know why, it all seems like a badly scripted soap opera to me- if I want to watch people being bitchy at each other, I'll pay attention to my idiot co-workers. When watching TV, I want a tight script, hot cast, and no illusion of 'reality'. I will give to the producers of this show in it's original form the kudos they deserve: Great work guys, you came up with a decent new game show.

But this year they've crossed the line from soap opera to the 'Cops' and 'Jerry Springer' genre of pandering to the stupidity of people in a way that is actively harmful. Breaking things down by race seems like harmless fun, if you have no understanding of history or human nature. They broke things down by gender and no one complained. This is worse though, because generally gender-based discrimination comes from not giving women any power- on survivor, by the nature of the game, everyone has power, so the men can't marginalize the women in the way they might in a male-dominated society. Race divisions are different. They come from the insatiable human need to divide his fellow beings into 'us' and 'them'. When you do that, you don't see people on the other side of that line with power as respectable equals, you see them as a threat. It gets the darkest kind of human competitiveness going.

Of course in the Survivor realm, everyone is also out for themselves, and in the racially mixed tribes of the past there has been some degree of tension, but this imposes the survivor system on a much older problem. People will quickly identify with their own tribe. They will quickly steriotype other tribes. Even if within the gameshow itself the people restrain themselves from overt racism out of self interest and the awareness of constant scrutiny, this show is a cultural phenominon. Imagine the first time one tribe is beaten by another. People who identify with the losing side will complain of bias, cheating, unfair conduct. They will steriotype the other tribe. Lots of people will do this, and it will inevitably get worse as long as the show goes on (let's hope this is the final nail in this shows coffin).

See, racial differences don't actually exist in and of themselves. If you took ten kids from ten different races and raised them together in a place where race was never mentioned, whatever differences imerged between them would be purely individual in nature, and would certainly not reflect the steriotypes of the races that exist in our culture. People see what the world says about their race- including what the members of their race say to them- and then become what is predicted of them. Not the other way around. So, because race is a culturally invented thing, and because Survivor is (unfortunately) such a strong cultural force, it will cause problems. It will light old fires and start new ones. All for fucking ratings. Bunch of damn tools. My advice: DO not watch survivor, and if you need to watch it or any other show from the same network, download it without ads so they make no revenue.

98

The Pope! haha. Lol. Rotfl.

Seriously, if you're going to run a massive, worldwide religion which controls the lives of a billion people, you'd think you could have more fun. The popemobile? Seriously, any reasonably smart person who had that much power would be using it to, say, enjoy life- lots of Women! Or, if they were of a more social bent, maybe to help the world. This guy does neither. He is neither venal nor generous- he just wastes that power, actually uses it to perpetuate itself, and little more. This guy has been so completely parasitized by this religion meme that he has totally abandoned his own genetic self-interest, or the interests of any other more compatable meme. What a tard!

Recently he said some nasty things about muslims. Okay, he quoted some 15th century 'scholar' who said some nasty things about muhammad, but for all intents and purposes, he took a big sharp stick and stuck it in the eye of all the people who follow another of the worlds big, angry, evangelical religions. This is funny. Because it is exactly what you'd predict of this sort of moron, and it doesn't happen often enough for me. See, religion is bad, not because it's nessesarily internally evil- some (not many) religions are pretty decent to be a part of, and on the balance actually improve quality of life. Just because you believe in some implausible mythical force doesn't mean you blow yourself up for it or do any of the other (very long list) of stupid, stupid things people regularly do for religion. religion is bad because it is yet another way for people to devide themselves into an 'us' and an (evil) 'them'. I'm part of sect A you're part of sect B, so it's okay for me to kill you, rape then murder your wife, take your daughter as chattel, kill your sons, and desicrate your home. This also works for races, national groups, and various other stupid things people use to justify being the evil bastards they really want to be. Religion is just one of these, but it's a big one and should be nerfed as often as possible for this reason.

So back to the pope. We who want to see the influence of religion diminish in the world should be pleased by his latest stupidity. Because it highlights our perennial point to our numerous semi-religious cohorts: we don't want religion making policy, because whatever religion is making the policy, everyone else suffers. State religion means that non-state religion will suffer as much as we cleverly non-religious types. So this helps to diminish the influence of the pope and his cronies over public policy, and that is good. The other nice way the pope has inadvertently assisted the cause of humankind is that he gives us a chance in the west to show that we're not just a bunch of crusaders to the people in the middle east. For them, and I'm talking about the likely reasonable majority who don't want war and terrorism, it would be educational to see that in the west, we don't kowtow to our religious leaders when they're acting like dicks. So it would be good if there was a large scale protest from all levels of western society against the pope's stupidity.

Here I go: THE POPE IS A FUCK-TARD AND NO ONE INTELLIGENT GIVES CRAP WHAT HE HAS TO SAY.

99

People who use a lot of drugs are sad, pathetic, and dumb. They are not the subject of this post. Prohibition is. I think in North America, and especially our sad southern neighbor, the USA, the prohibition of soft drugs like marijuana is a travesty of justice, a huge waste of resources, and basically just stupid on a massive scale. Legalize Mary-Jane and you deprive organized crime of a massive income stream, you provide the government with a nice new taxable buisness, you give yourself a real way to keep the drug away from kids while allowing adults to do as they will, and you stop wasting criminal-justice dollars fighting an unwinnable and unjustifiable war. I have been, up till now, on the fence about harder drugs.
Harder drugs give some credence to the harm-prevention arguement behind drug laws. Herion and its ilk really do destroy lives, reducing people to anti-social wreaks incapable of functioning in society, willing to do anything for that next fix. Part of the predicament of these people is because of the social marginalization that comes from doing something illegal, but the problem would still be very bad if what they did was fully legal. I think if I was running things I'd try to make it legal but unpleasant, deprive the crime world of as much income as possible without giving clear state approval for drug use.
But now I think full legalization of all narcotics would be, on the balance, a good thing. This is because of Afganistan. Here we have a country where dirt-poor starving people can make thousands of dollars, a true fortune to them, by planting poppies. The only alternative is food crops which don't provide a fraction of the income. There are also the warlords and taliban making profit from this trade. Full legalization would allow all of those poor farmers to come under the protection of the elected government, meaning the NATO forces there could stop trying to enforce drug laws against peasants and fight the asshole warlords, who would have much less income because their product would no longer be a monopoly. This is a paralell to the priohibition of alcohol in the 20th century. The idea that just because something is bad that a total state ban on it is good is absurd. Whenever you try to impose any law on people there is a cost. When the state tries to impose a ban on something people do in private, to themselves, it is not only over-reaching its moral authority, but also its capacity to impose its will. The good that a well run state can do is undermined when it tries to over-reach in this way, and in the case of Afganistan, this could lead to the demise of the state.

To those who would complain I don't understand the devastation that drugs can cause, I would argue that that damage, however severe, is not in my estimation on par with the damage of war, imprisonment, violence and death that are the alternatives offered. If I was given the power, I would scrub all herion, and the plants that produce it, from the world forever. Likewise with every other recreational narcotic, including Mary-Jane, alcohol, nicotine, and maybe even caffine. I can't, and no one can, or likely will, have the power to do that. Drugs are here to stay, so we can act like adults and minimize the damage, or act like idiots and pretend we can win the mindless 'war on drugs'.

100

I'll jump right in. I've decided that people fuck up a lot, and that this is amusing, so I'm going to write about it.

Spam is good. The fuck up here is that people don't like it, but people are dumb not to like spam. Why do people not like spam? Because it's a nuisance, it fills their inbox with crap, requires a load of filters to keep out, and these filters inevitably catch some real e-mail and so you still end up sorting through all the spam yourself. How many times do you need to get a message telling you about penis enlargement, great 'investments', horny housewives, and all that other sleazy crap? You don't, and you hate it, and it sucks. But guess what, there is something worse.
Traditional junk mail. All those fliers for crap you don't need from stores you don't go to, the endless menus from generic chinese or pizza places, these things are worse. See, when you round up all your spam mail and hit the delete key, how much energy is expended? Barely any, just as it took virtually no energy to send the spam in the first place. Yeah, yeah, spam clogs the internet, creating endless useless traffic which slows down all of our useful applications, but I'm not really saying Spam is 'good' in a absolute sense.
Given a world with or a world without spam, all else being totoally equal, the world without would be mildly less aggrevating. But spam replaces the much worse traditional junk mail.
Every time they mass send one of those dumbass fliers it costs tens of thousands of dollars, wastes hundreds of hours of work time, kills trees, fills landfills, all just for the off chances you'll actually look at those flashy adds before tossing the whole lot into the garbage, (or marginally better, the recycling box). Spam is better than that. I want all the assholes in marketing companies to start using spam instead of traditional junk mail. Or better yet, maybe they could put all of their creative energy into actually making something in the world better, instead of finding a better way to flog the same old crap on us.